Take an iPad 2 and HDMI adapter-enabled video mirroring and what do you get? Well in this quick test you get Infinity Blade and Angry Birds Seasons on a 50" HDTV screen. Sure on a 1080p display apps are letter- and pillar-boxed (black bars on all four sides) to maintain pixels (no blurry/aliased extrapolations that we could see) but video outputs full screen as always so it wasn't a huge deal. Playing iOS games at that size was.

No using iPad 2 as a big, tethered game controller probably isn't ideal and yes, business and educational institutions will likely be far more productive with video mirroring, but boy was this fun.

Nice work. I agree that connecting your iPad 2 to your TV, with a cable, isn't really an optimal experience. Then again, it has many practical uses.
Apple is probably setting the stage for apps on Apple TV, but figuring out the control scheme and determining if it makes sense to have "unified" iPhone / iPad / Apple TV apps or special Apple TV-only apps is going to take a lot of careful experimentation.
Apple really does the deep thinking and perfects their products before releasing them. Unlike certain other companies whose product mascot is a green garbage-can like robot.

I actually thought you had a good comment until the lame attempt at trolling in the last paragraph.
Back on topic: I think display mirroring will become more and more useful and hopefully lead to Apple TV apps

What surprises me is that they did this, this way.
From a product standpoint, I'm surprised they didn't do the iPad mirroring via AppleTV and AirPlay...in other words, have something in settings that allows you to activate mirroring via AirPlay, and then it just mirrors straight to the AppleTV, instead of using an HDMI cable.

OMG, how did I miss out so many words in my last post! I'll try again:
Why is it rendering in a tiny window? Does your TV not offer any scaling from HDMI inputs? If so, you must have a very very old TV?!

Its great but the problem is - while looking at the your big screen TV- you can't tell exactly where you are touching all the time on the ipad. Basically, it all depends on the way the game's input was designed. Some are unplayable, and some work really well. Driving/Racing games which use the accelerometer are awesome through HDMI because you're basically tilting the iPad back and forth while looking at your big mother of an LCD. I have to try Infinity Blade, but it looks playable because it uses the whole screen for slicing and dicing which is easy to pull off without having touch a specific spot. Again though, when it's time to pull off magic, you'll have to look down at your ipad for a split second to quickly get your finger on the icon.

I just compared HDMI out on my Samsung 58 inch plasma screen. The XOOM was incredible and filled the entire screen. It fit perfectly and used an industry standard $10 cable. The IPad2 by comparison had big ugly black bars ON ALL SIDES just to try and fit the screen, It was double ugly!!!! And with this bad compromise, the screen area was MUCH SMALLER. You can increase it but then you chop off the controls of games or lose movie details. The Apple IPad 2 uses some dongle thingy that is 4 times the cost. I am no fanboy for either Pad and love them both, but IPad2 loses this in a BIG, IMPORTANT WAY>>>>